The Journal: What About Writing Are You Grateful For?

In today’s Journal

* What About Writing Are You Grateful For?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

What About Writing Are You Grateful For?

With Thanksgiving Day rapidly approaching, over at the Kill Zone blog Kay DiBianca posed a question: What one thing about writing are you grateful for? She then suggested, “It can be a book you’ve read, a mentor who’s inspired and helped you, a blog you love, or any other person or thing you’re grateful for.”

For me, the response was immediate and definitive: I’m grateful to my characters for enabling me to experience their stories and live vicariously in so many times and places.

Through them I’ve traveled faster than light through space and helped colonize a distant planet. Through them I’ve solved crimes, been involved in wars, and defended this Earth from alien invaders. And through them I’ve ridden wild on a sorrel stallion in a just cause, a Navy Colt in either hand and a repeating carbine in my saddle scabbard.

In this world where you (probably) get only one extremely brief turn at life, who could ask for more than that? Yet in this whole “living your life” thing, once is definitely not enough.

Not that I would want to extend my current life beyond whatever it will be anyway. I wouldn’t, even if I could do it through an “age exchange,” as I did in my free SF short story “Going Back”.

So what about writing are you thankful for? Share your thoughts in a comment at https://hestanbrough.com/the-journal-what-about-writing-are-you-grateful-for, or swing by Kay’s post and leave a comment there.

Talk with you again later.

Of Interest

See “We Live By a Unit of Time That Doesn’t Make Sense” at https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/11/weeks-seven-days-david-henkin/620712/. I seldom know or care what day it is until I give it some thought.

See “Natural Born Killer-Story Teller” at https://www.robertjsadler.com/post/natural-born-killer-story-teller.

See “The Commas That Cost Companies Millions” at https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-that-cost-companies-millions.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………………… 320 words

Writing of WCGN 5: Carmelita Ramos (novel)

Day 1…… XXXX words. Total words to date…… XXXXX

Total fiction words for November……… XXXX
Total fiction words for the year………… 623282
Total nonfiction words for November… 8870
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 187360
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 810642

Calendar Year 2021 Novels to Date…………………… 13
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… 1
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 66
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31

Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.